First Large UK Offshore Wind Power Station Goes On Line

[hatrack]

LONDON - Electricity from the UK's first major offshore wind farm flowed ashore on Friday, welcomed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, power utilities and environmental groups as a major step forward in renewable energy.


When it is operating at full capacity, the seventy million sterling 30-turbine North Hoyle wind farm, seven to eight kilometres (four to five miles) off the Welsh coast, will provide energy for up to 50,000 homes and a total capacity of 60 megawatts.

EDIT

The project took eight months to complete, and will offset the release of 160,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year."

EDIT

Reuters

[mike_c]

1. nice to read some truely good news for a change....

Thanks!

[theivoryqueen]

2. Yay! they should cover Texas in those windmills

We have lots of ugly land (we need to camouflage) and plenty of extra wind we cound spare (especially of the "hot" variety)

[punpirate]

4. Have a look about eight miles east...

... of Sweetwater, on a low mesa south of I-20. A sight for sore eyes. About 100 of them up and running, and more being installed, I think.

Cheers.

[GreenGreenLimaBean]

8. or East of Ft. Stockton

on I10, 1000's of them.

[kimchi]

3. Good news for a change!

May it be the start of a new energy paradigm.

[seekerofwisdom]

5. It is good news

And I hope it is the beginning of a paradigm shift.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/windpoweringamerica/wind_resources.html

Provides details of the wind "resources" in North America.

I can't understand why every 5 years wind power incentives need renewing in Congress yet oil and petroleum and coal R&D subsidies, besides being a greater $ value than renewable R&D, are given concurrent funding almost without question.

Is it just the Conservatives or is Congress on the payroll of some lobby groups with powerful oil and coal corporate backing?

[NNadir]

6. Both, I'd guess.

As we discussed here in a few other threads, wind power is increasingly unpopular in the US on NIMBY grounds.

Too bad; it's very clean energy.

[Flightful]

7. Wind ain't clean

How do you think those bird cuisinarts are manufactured? Don't kid yourself, it takes several hundred to produce the output of one conventional generator, and it doesn't even replace any generators because they need to be backed up with equivalent coal, gas or nuclear capacity because the wind is not reliable. The Pickering Wind Turbine outside Toronto produced just 18% of its rated capacity last year.

[treepig]

9. perhap insight from more knowledgeable persons

will refute these ideas, but aren't giant capacitors and low-drag, multi-ton flywheels being developed for short-term energy storage required for both wind and solar power?

also, my understanding is that operators of coal and gas power plants deliberately ramped production up and down dramatically, on a scale of a few minutes, during the california energy crises - so it it at least theoretically possible to correlate the output of wind and solar power with more conventional sources.

[NNadir]

10. Wind and solar are suitable for peak loads.

It is true that wind power requires back up from other sources of energy since it is obvious that the wind is not always blowing, nor is the sun always shining. However, both forms of energy are predictable, solar obviously being more predictable than wind. You can however, turn on the weather channel and see when the wind is going to blow and plan your back up power accordingly. Even if you power down coal and oil plants, you are saving greenhouse emmissions by capturing this clean energy.

The bird question has been addressed in many other threads, and its pretty clear that cats are a much bigger threat to birds than wind farms, by a factor of thousands. It may be true that oil spills kill more birds than windmills as well.

(Interestingly, the worst nuclear accident ever seems to have had a positive effect on bird life. The accident at Chernobyl seems to have created a wild life park because it drove the human beings away. According to Michail Bondarkov, Director of the International Radioecology laboratory in the Ukraine, "48 endangered species listed in the international Red Book of protected animals and plants are now thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Of the 270 species of birds in the area, 180 species are breeding the rest being migrants that are passing through. Breeding birds include the rare green crane, black stork, white-tailed sea eagle and fish hawk." )

http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/151-175/00166_chernobyl_wildlife_park.html


Wind and solar are particularly useful in peak load situations, which occur every day as power demands fluctuate with human activities.

The best form of energy for constant loads is nuclear power. Nuclear power is not particularly useful for peak load demands because nuclear plants will not restart quickly after shutdown because of a factor known as xenon poisoning. Thus you cannot repeatedly shut a nuclear plant down and restart it quickly. Depending on the circumstances, it can take up to 12 hours to bring a nuclear plant on line after shut down, while you wait for the Xenon-135 to decay out of it. (Note: This is not a problem with the accelerator driven sub-critical reactors that are sometimes proposed for "waste" transmutation systems.)

I'm sure that this Pickering system problem, if it is serious, results from bad planning. One should prospect for wind resources, just as one would prospect for oil or natural gas. Some windy areas are better than others. It is disingenious to point to particular installations of any type of energy system and make generalizations about the scheme as a whole. For the 18% of the time that the wind field is producing power, less coal and oil is being burned, and this is a good thing. Wind power and solar power are clean forms of energy that can fill important niche roles, particularly at those times when demand is high. Though solar energy is better at addressing peak loads, which usually occur midday, wind has an important role to play.

[Kellanved]

11. OK

But we're disucssing an offshore plant here. Those are more powerful and more predictable than any windmill built at a location, where it doesn't belong.

[punpirate]

12. Time for you to research...

... rather than complain. Wind is cleaner than any other fossil fuel or nuclear technology available today, as is solar.

What is "one conventional generator"? Are you speaking of a 1000 mW nuclear plant, or one 45 mW peak-shaving coal-fired plant? Even if the former, several hundred WTGs are much cheaper and more environmentally-sound than one nuclear plant. Keep in mind when there's a scram at a nuclear plant, all generating capacity is shut down. When a windmill fails, it's nominally less than 1% of the output of the whole farm, the remainder of which continues to operate.

And, how do you define "wind is not reliable"? In the optimum locations for siting wind farms, it's quite reliable. Wind is everywhere. Period.

So Toronto screwed up. Generalize from a particular at your peril.

Cheers.

[NNadir]

13. The chief reason that costs associated with nuclear plants have gone

down, while capacity has gone up (nuclear plants are generating more power than ever before, despite the fact that there are fewer of them operating) is because scrams are very rare. All power plants are shut down at some point.

I support wind power, but I note that the entire facility shuts down when the wind stops blowing. They are however, when they operate, extraordinarily clean. Are you claiming that there are readily accessible places on earth where the wind blows 100% of the time? In my life I've not seen such a place.

I would disagree with the comment that all solar power, in particular, PV is cleaner than nuclear. A truly industrial PV system would involve huge amounts of Cadmium mining, not to mention the environmental cost of storing energy overnight.

[punpirate]

14. I'd have to check on the "more for less" argument...

... about nuclear, and the ancillary issues, but I won't argue it for the moment. I'd have to look at the recent data, which I have not, lately.

I wouldn't ever make a blanket statement that the wind blows 100% of the time in all places, but there are many where it's darn near all the time. West Texas, the Great Lakes (where onshore/offshore winds virtually guarantee winds most of the time).

As for cadmium, that's in a relatively new cell under development (cadmium telluride), and the pollution therefrom is directly associated with the degree to which environmental protections are employed in the mining, refining and manufacture, not with associated pollution in the production of the energy the cell produces. Cadmium is in general use in a wide variety of industrial and plating processes, so solar cells, even if the new technology finds wider implementation, is not the sole, nor the major, reason for cadmium mining and refining. Applying proper controls is the solution to that problem.

As for storage, when there's no wind, that's to mean battery technology (in conjunction with synchronous inverters). With regard to pollution, that's a matter of proper clean-up of expended batteries, not of the technology itself. But, in practical terms, most of the bigger wind farm installations are using induction-synchronized generators, so batteries are a moot point.

I'm hardly arguing that solar or wind or biomass energy generators are free of technology, or the consequences of technology manufacture--what I am saying is that those consequences are controllable in ways that unrestricted energy generation by coal and nuclear means are not. The amount of mercury discharged from coal-burning plants of all sorts is far too great, and every instance of recent government action is to ignore that fact (to the extent that the Bush administration has taken mercury off the list of hazardous emissions in the latest energy bill), and that single issue does not address the equally distressing matters of smog, air quality and acid rain. I can speak authoritatively to that after spending several years in the clean coal research field.

The problems associated with disposal of fission by-products are still with us, and are still contentious.

And, nowhere in the general argument is conservation given any real consideration, in very large part because traditional industries depend upon profits from profligacy. That applies to energy use, as well--even at industrial wholesale rates, the energy cost to manufacture a new automobile is about 25% of the total cost. Planned obsolescence figures prominently into the overall energy use of our country. We expend almost as much energy in this country to build a washing machine which lasts five years as Europeans do to build a similar item which lasts twenty years.

Cheers.